TELEHOR
mezinarodni casopis pro visualni kulturu
internationale zeitschrift fur visuelle kultur
the international review new vision
revue internationale pour la culture visuelle
László Moholy-Nagy
László Moholy-Nagy [Editor]: TELEHOR [mezinarodni casopis pro visualni kulturu / internationale zeitschrift fur visuelle kultur / the international review new vision / revue internationale pour la culture visuelle]. Brno, Czechoslovakia: Frantisek Kalivoda, 1936. First edition: Year 1 no 1-2: all published. Text in English, French, German and Czech. Quarto. Wire spiral binding. Thick 4-color printed wrappers. 138 pp. 69 photographs, photoplastics, film clips, paintings and constructions, 9 reproduced in color. Multiple paper stocks. Period design and typography by noted Czech Avant-Garde Architect Frantisek Kalivoda. Spine heel and crown lightly worn. Covers faintly worn. The only number of this Czech periodical, and one of the most important Moholy-Nagy publications. A very good or better copy.
Formerly the painter impressed his vision on his age; today it is the photographer. — László Moholy-Nagy
8.25 x 11.75 spiral-bound book with 138 pages and 69 photographs, photoplastics, film clips, paintings and constructions, 9 reproduced in color. TELEHOR illustrates Moholy-Nagy's work in painting, photography, and graphics. With an introduction by Siegfried Giedion and several important texts by Moholy-Nagy.
Contents:
Foreword by Siegfried Giedion
Letter to Frantisek Kalivoda by László Moholy-Nagy
From Pigment to Light by László Moholy-Nagy
A New Instrument of Vision by László Moholy-Nagy
Problems of the Modern Film by László Moholy-Nagy
Once a Chicken, Always a Chicken by László Moholy-Nagy: a film script on a motif from Kurt Schwitter's Auguste Bolte
Postscript by Frantisek Kalivoda
Important monograph on the varied career of Moholy-Nagy, modernist giant., modernist painter, Bauhaus professor, photographer, film-maker, designer, sculptor, repeated exile, and more. TELEHOR includes Moholy's own writings on modern design -- and the merging of theory and design. Also included are many beautifully-reproduced paintings, photographs and photograms. For Moholy-Nagy, photography was of inestimable value in educating the eye to what he called "the new vision." He believed that the camera, through its ability to manipulate light and its capacity of the eye, could help us alter our traditional perceptual habits.
As a painter, typographer, photographer, stage designer, and architect, Moholy was one of the most creative intelligences of our time. — Herbert Read.
From Frantisek Kalivoda's Postscript: "It was my aim in editing the present issue of this journal to indicate the progress of visual art and the perspectives of its future development. For it is the basic programme of this periodical to discuss the problems of modern art and to indicate the precise connections existing between its various categories and, in particular, between the spheres of painting, photography and film."
"To demonstrate the underlying unity of all these arts, I could do no better than select the rich and many-sided work of one artist, L. Moholy-Nagy, whose versatility can scarcely be rivaled among his fellow artists of to-day. "
A classic volume representing a high point of Eastern European Modernism in form and content, and in exceptional condition. Highly recommended.
László Moholy-Nagy [Hungarian, 1895 – 1946] was a born teacher, convinced that everyone had talent. In 1923, he joined the staff of the Bauhaus, which had been founded by Walter Gropius at Weimar four years before. Kandinsky, Klee, Feininger and Schlemmer were already teaching there. He was brought in at a time when the school was undergoing a decisive change of policy, shedding its original emphasis on handcraft. The driving force was now "the unity of art and technology.” Moholy-Nagy was entrusted with teaching the preliminary course in principles of form, materials and construction - the basis of the Bauhaus's educational program. He shared teaching duties with the painter Josef Albers, whose career was to develop in parallel with his.
The hyper-energetic Moholy-Nagy also ran the metal workshop at the Bauhaus in Weimar and later in the purpose-designed buildings at Dessau. The metal shop was the most successful of departments at the Bauhaus in fulfilling Gropius's vision of art for mass production, redefining the role of the artist to embrace that of designer as we have now come to understand the term. The workshop experimented with glass and Plexiglas as well as metal in developing the range of lighting that has almost come to define the Bauhaus. The lamps were produced in small production runs, and some were taken up by outside factories. The royalties made a welcome contribution to the school's always precarious finances.
Although always a painter and designer, Moholy-Nagy became a key figure in photography in Germany in the 1920's. In 1928 Moholy-Nagy left the Bauhaus and traveled to Amsterdam and London. His teachings and publications of photographic experimentations were crucial to the international development of the New Vision.
In 1937 former Bauhaus Master László Moholy-Nagy accepted the invitation of a group of Midwest business leaders to set up an Industrial Design school in Chicago. The New Bauhaus opened in the Fall of 1937 financed by the Association of Arts and Industries as a recreation of the Bauhaus curriculum with its workshops and holistic vision in the United States.
Moholy-Nagy drew on several émigrés affiliated with the former Bauhaus to fill the ranks of the faculty, including György Kepes and Marli Ehrman. The school struggled with financial issues and insufficient enrollment and survived only with the aid from grants of the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations as well as from donations from numerous Chicago businesses. The New Bauhaus was renamed the Institute of Design in 1944 and the school finally merged with the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in 1949.
In Chicago Moholy aimed at liberating the creative potential of his students through disciplined experimentation with materials, techniques, and forms. The focus on natural and human sciences was increased, and photography grew to play a more prominent role at the school in Chicago than it had done in Germany. Training in mechanical techniques was more sophisticated than it had been in Germany. Emerging from the basic course, various workshops were installed, such as "light, photography, film, publicity", "textile, weaving, fashion", "wood, metal, plastics", "color, painting, decorating" and "architecture". The most important achievement at the Chicago Bauhaus was probably in photography, under the guidance of teachers such as György Kepes, Nathan Lerner, Arthur Siegel or Harry Callahan.
Moholy-Nagy served as Director of the New Bauhaus in its various permutations until his death in 1946. [xlist_2018]